Canada travels

Today is the last day of 2009 and it’s been an amazing year! We managed to travel a fair bit this year, actually the most we’ve traveled in one year… EVER!

2009 started off with a week up in a cottage in the Kawartha Lakes region, close to Coboconk, Ontario. My husband is an avid winter camper, camper PERIOD, as seen in other posts in this blog but I…. AM NOT! That’s putting it mildly. So when he booked this trip to go camping in the middle of a Canadian winter… I thought he’d lost his mind. Thankfully he knows me well and booked a brand-spanking new, deluxe cottage! This is my kind of camping! To top it all off… he got quite the deal on the place. Can you believe a full week for around $130!! He’s a deal finder if I’ve ever known one. It was an amazing week away, to rest and relax and to enjoy our children. As leaders of a church… the last 4-6 weeks of each year are extra busy and sometimes overwhelming.

In June I took my 3rd child back home to White Rock, British Columbia. Trust me… he didn’t mind missing 2 weeks of school by this point of the school year!! Our time out there was filled to the brim with visiting family and eating at my parents wonderful Roadhouse restaurant. The trip spanned a family wedding and my younger sister’s birthday and many wonderful moments in between. These kinds of trips would not be possible without the generosity of my parents, without their wonderful gift each year… I don’t know when I’d be able to see my family.

Then came summer! It didn’t really feel like summer here in southwestern Ontario, the weather did not want to cooperate! Regardless, my hubby managed to get a couple of weeks in of his style of camping. He took a group of youth from our church canoeing/portaging for a week and then took another group of men from another church and our oldest son on a trek through the woods and beautiful lakes.

Towards the middle of August we started packing for our greatest adventure of the year. We took 3 weeks off and drove to South Carolina for our family’s very first big vacation. Imagine 7 of us in a vehicle (we took a teen from church to help look after the kids)… on the road for a minimum of 10 hours a day… resting in a few locations along the way. We broke up the trip into a bunch of stops…

Our 1st big stop: Shenandoah Valley, Virginia. My hubby booked us a few days at a horse ranch/resort. We stayed in a Yurt! Yup, a large tent but this was a deluxe version with a beautiful kitchen, master bedroom and even flat screen TV’s! While we were here, hubby golfed the rest of us either lounged by the pool or went horse-back riding. I even tried my hand at tennis! We did manage to do some siteseeing “off the ranch” in the 4 days we were here. We drove a little bit into town to see Thomas Jefferson’s house, Monticello. He was one smart cookie!!

Then we were off to the Outer Banks of North Carolina! First night… Kill Devil Hills. We didn’t have much time here, not enough time to see the Wright Brothers National Memorial/Museum, just a quick dip in the Atlantic Ocean and we were off. The next day we spent over 10 hours in the vehicle again, driving through Rodanthe and taking a couple ferries along the way until we could get to our friend’s place to crash for the night in Morehead City, NC.

The day after that brought us to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We stayed in two different locations while we were here, I think for a total of 9 days. The first half of the stay was spent in a resort right on the beach, we could come and go in the surf as much as we pleased. It was a new experience for the kids… swimming in salt water! I kept having to tell them to keep their mouths and their eyes closed. They didn’t have anything available for our entire stay in Myrtle Beach so we had to move to another resort called Harbour Lights, this one was a lot further from the beach but thankfully they had a pool! They were also a lot closer to tons of golf courses so hubby was in his element! He took our oldest golfing one day and had a really great time together.

Our final destination in South Carolina brought us to one of my favourite locations in the entire United States of America! Charleston, South Carolina. We stayed in an old Cotton mill that had been converted into an Inn, it was in the heart of historic Charleston so I could easily walk to wherever I wanted to go. I strolled the streets and markets alone while hubby took the kids to various sites like, Fort Sumter and an aircraft carrier. It was wonderful and peaceful and chalked full of history! Hubby and I had a chance to spend a romantic weekend here in late October 2008, I have a photo album on facebook you can view those incredible shots! The weather was much better that trip so my pictures turned out better.

Then began the end of our journey, the long dreaded 16 + hour drive home… resting for a couple of days in West Virginia with my hubby’s sister and her hubby. I questioned my sanity at a few rest stops along the way. I don’t think we’re ready to drive to DisneyWorld next summer.

September blew by, my hubby took a church business trip to California the day after we got home from holidays and followed it up by helping his brother move clear across the country, that was quite the road trip for him!

And then boom, here we are! The end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010. It’s been an amazing year, it’s difficult to mention everything that has gone on, I think we had 6 weddings, two of which my hubby performed and I photographed. It was full of God moments and encounters, blessings and opportunities to share with others. I’m looking forward to 2010 and not just because we head back to the Coboconk cottage tomorrow…

Happy New Year Everyone!

(The majority of the ability to take such trips was made possible by my new job with WhiteCloud Marketing and my work done for Canadian Tire Travel Insurance and TW Rentals in particular)